Masaki Kobayashi was one of Japan’s great post-war directors whose most enduring work was 1964’s Kwaidan, the most expensive Japanese film made up to that time. The film, which was an anthology of ghost stories, was a bigger hit outside of Japan than within despite having won a special jury prize at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Kobayashi was never again given a large budget with which to work and had to scramble to bring his projects to fruition for the remainder of his life.

Kobayashi had been known as a director of social dramas before filming Kwaidan, comprised of two of the stories in Lofcadio Hearn’s 1903 book Kwaidan and two stories from his other works. Hearn, who died in 1904 at the age of 54, had a fascinating life. His father, an Irish Surgeon-Major in the British Navy and his mother, a Greek woman of noble lineage, named him after a Greek island. His father moved them to Ireland, leaving them in the care of his family. He returned briefly to impregnate his wife for a third time, their first child having died when Lafcadio was a toddler.

His mother, homesick for her own country, returned to Greece leaving him in the care of a great-aunt. His father divorced his mother who remarried in Greece. His father died when he was still a boy. The great-aunt died when he was 19 and he was given a one-way ticket to America by her solicitor, the manager of her bankrupt estate. There he lived an impoverished life until he found work as a reporter in Cleveland and later New Orleans where he married. He divorced his wife and left New Orleans in 1890, moving to Japan where he became fascinated with the Japanese ghost stories that had been passed down verbally from generation to generation. He married the daughter of a samurai family and from her and others learned all the stories and wrote them down. The written stories, like Kobayashi’s film, were better received outside of Japan than within.

Despite the warm reception the film received in the U.S. in 1965, it wasn’t until the Criterion’s DVD release of the film in 2000 that U.S. audiences were able to see the original three-hour-and-eight-minute film. The original U.S. release had been whittled down to two hours by shaving off bits and pieces of three of the four stories and omitting arguably the best one altogether. Criterion has now done a superb 2K digital restoration of Kobayashi’s original cut for Blu-ray with new audio commentary by film historian Stephen Prince, a new piece on Hearn, a new interview with assistant director Kiyoshi Ogasawara, and an archival interview with Kobayashi conducted for Japanese television in 1993, three years before his death.

Although classified as horror, the film is more fantasy than horror. The best sequence, as I alluded to above, is in the second story Woman in the Snow in which a young man witnesses a female ghost suck the life out of an elderly fisherman. He doesn’t realize that the beautiful young woman he meets and marries the following spring is the ghost trying to live as a mortal, even to the point of giving him three children. Their story and its resolution is more poignant and sad than it is scary, as are the other three stories.

Criterion has also done a 2K digital restoration of David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood, the director’s breakout horror film.

Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar get star billing as a psychoanalyst and his star patient, but the lesser-known Art Hindle carries the film as Eggar’s estranged husband whose main concern is protecting the couple’s daughter from a brood of mutant children. While not a great film, the director’s trademark sense of dread that would manifest itself in such later classics as The Fly, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises was already in evidence. Extras include separately filmed new interviews with Eggar and Hindle who appears with Cindy Hinds, the actress who played his daughter in the film.

Reed, who died in 1999 while filming Gladiator, starred along with Karen Black, Lee Montgomery, and Bette Davis in Dan Curtis’ 1976 horror film Burnt Offerings, newly released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.

This is one of those horror films I hate in which all the good people die and evil prevails. If that’s your cup of tea, you might enjoy it. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now.

The most interesting parts of the new release for me are the newly conducted interviews with Montgomery and character actor Anthony James who has a bit part in the film, but is known for his portrayal of the racist diner counterman in In the Heat of the Night

Speaking of Gladiator, two of director Ridley Scott’s subsequent films have just been newly released on Blu-ray, one for the first time and one in a restored director’s cut.

Scott’s 2003 film Matchstick Men is a bit of departure for the action director, concentrating mostly on the domestic situation involving career grifter Nicolas Cage and the young girl (Alison Lohman) who claims to be his daughter. Sam Rockwell co-stars as his apprentice con man. It’s all done very well with a twist ending you may or may not see coming.

The 10th Anniversary Edition of Scott’s 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven is being presented in three versions on the same disc, the theatrical release version, a director’s cut, and a roadshow director’s cut, which is Scott’s preferred version. Set in the 12th Century, this bloody epic of the crusades is a bit confusing at times, but well done for the genre. Orlando Bloom stars with strong support from Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis, Eva Green, and Iain Glenn. A second disc contains a wealth of extras.

Closer in time, James Kent’s recent Testament of Youth gives us Alicia Vikander in a beautifully modulated performance as a young woman in World War I England. Based on the still-in-print autobiography of Eva Brittain, the film begins with a leisurely look into the lives of Oxford-bound Brittain, her younger brother (Taron Egerton), and her brother’s two friends (Colin Morgan and Brittain’s future fiancé Kit Harington). The war intrudes on their young lives as it does on thousands of others and puts an end to their hopes and dreams. The leisurely pace of the film’s early scenes gives way to the stepped-up pace of the war and desolation it caused. The supporting cast includes Dominic West and Emily Watson as Brittain’s’s parents, and Miranda Richardson as an Oxford administrator who mentors her.

Testament of Youth is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The year’s biggest box-office hit, a reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise, called Jurassic World, is not exciting, not thrilling, not funny, not scary, in short not much of anything. One doesn’t expect the genetically engineered dinosaurs to have much personality, but neither do any of the characters, especially Dallas Bryce Howard as a throwback to the dumb broad characterizations of women in films of the early 1930s. Chris Pratt, star of last year’s megahit Guardians of the Galaxy, deserves a more engaging sparring partner.

Jurassic World is available on Blu-ray 3D, standard Blu-ray, and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include the long anticipated restored 50th Anniversary Edition of My Fair Lady and the Criterion Blu-ray of Mulholland Drive.